The before (Sept. 2) and after (Nov. 29) pictures at the airport can’t begin to portray all that the students experienced, nor how they grew and changed.

Doug and Maria just said goodbye to the students at the Lima airport, as we sent them on their journey back to the campus. Below are before/after pictures bookending their time in Peru on SST. We were blessed to have had them for almost 3 months here, and it was inspiring to see how they faced the challenges of a cross-cultural immersion experience. We will miss them.

We are all on retreat outside Lima until we leave for the airport tomorrow night. The students have been giving presentations on their projects and service assignments, with a worship service this morning and free time for fellowship scattered throughout the day. Everyone has marveled on all that has happened since they got off the plane almost 3 months ago, and now they are anticipating what it will be like to return home as different students in many ways.

All the students have safely returned from their service assignments back to Casa Goshen in Lima. Each group warmly welcomed the other groups, with many accumulated stories of trials and tribulations being shared.

Although Thanksgiving was actually on Thursday, we waited to celebrate until Friday evening when everyone was here. Our cook, Alicia, prepared turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, salad, and applesauce for the feast. Before digging in, everyone took turns sharing what they were thankful for at this moment, and that took no short amount of time to do. After the meal we had a surprise birthday cake for Achieng, whose birthday happened while everyone was separated on service.

Tomorrow morning students will visit their families in Lima, and then we’ll leave for a 2-day retreat to process the last 3 months and prepare for the return to the U.S.

]]>https://www.goshen.edu/peru/2016/11/25/students-return-lima-service-assignments/feed/0A Journal Entry from Katie: “A collection of short stories about the first week in San Roque”https://www.goshen.edu/peru/2016/11/19/journal-entry-katie-collection-short-stories-first-week-san-roque/
https://www.goshen.edu/peru/2016/11/19/journal-entry-katie-collection-short-stories-first-week-san-roque/#respondSat, 19 Nov 2016 20:52:55 +0000https://www.goshen.edu/peru/?p=32980Keep reading »]]>

Katie in the kitchen with her host mother.

Day 1: We went to English classes with our brothers at 8 a.m. Class started at 9:30. Every student practiced greeting us in English. Then we went to play futbolito (traumatic flashbacks to Caral). Then we went to the river, where we all jumped in for the first time off a falling apart straw hut over a deck 20-30 feet above the water. Welcome to San Roque time, English classes, and the river!

The running water is only on for a few hours in the a.m. and a few hours in the p.m. This is totally fine until you have to go to the bathroom during the day. Finally, after almost a week of holding it, I learned how to flush a toilet without running water by pouring water into it. Welcome to how helpful my standardized school knowledge is when it comes to living life in San Roque! (Not at all).

Although I’ve yet to see a tarantula, there were 3 giant (to me) cockroaches above my bed one night. My brother about died of laughter when I came to get him to get rid of them. He calmly plucked them off the wall with his fingers. Welcome to bugs in the jungle.

On our first full Friday here we decided to go to Tarapoto to a café to get some wifi and see what the big city was like. To get there and back you have to cram in a car with however many people are going at that time for the 45-minute ride. On our way back, we were already full, about to leave, when a man walked up with a 10-foot-long roll of tin. We were sure he’d wait for the next car, but alas, he and his massive roll of construction materials got in too, and I spent the ride hunched down underneath it as we wound back up the mountain to San Roque. Welcome to jungle transportation.

Yesterday my sister, her 6-year-old daughter and I went to the river in the afternoon. We sat on rocks in the river for about an hour talking about life and children and boyfriends and families and the U.S. and Peru. I thought, “What a universal, special, timeless thing – 2 women sitting in the river with a naked child, talking about life. Welcome to San Roque.

[This is the last post from visits to student service assignments. In a few days the students will all be returning to Lima, and we will post a couple more updates once they are all here and from our final retreat before they fly back to the U.S.]

San Roque, where these three students are doing their service, is most notable for its size; whereas Ayacucho, Cuzco and Arequipa are major cities of several hundred thousand people, San Roque’s population is a mere 800. Another significant difference is altitude; rather than being in the high Andes Mountains, it sits down in the hot, humid lush Amazon basin; there are more shades of green than you can count.

After a 45-minute taxi ride from the airport in Tarapoto to the village of San Roque, the 3 students met Maria and Doug for a hike to the chakra (farm plot) of Katie’s host family. Her father, Avelino, showed us where they grow coffee, cacao, beans, corn, and more, plus a pond for raising tilapia. The chackra produces food all year long, making the family almost entirely self-sufficient, which we saw at lunch in Katie’s home with her mother Esperanza, brother Heber, sister-in-law Angelica, and their daughter Greise.

While the students spend some time working with their families in the chacras, their main projects include teaching some English classes and creating a syllabus for an ecotourism course to be given to locals who will take tourists on guided tours. While the English courses are taught in residents’ homes or at a shelter in the town’s park, much of the work on the ecotourism syllabus happens at “the rock,” a large flat boulder at the Cumbaza river that serves dual purposes as an executive desk and a diving platform for taking refreshing dips.

For supper Friday evening we ate with Josh’s family, including his father Heiser, mother Mirlanith, and brothers Brayan and Gino. Because the family’s oldest son, Kenlly, wasn’t home that night, we were invited to return the following evening for another supper with the family.

On Saturday morning we had breakfast at the home of Riley and her host mother Lisseth. Because Riley’s host father Juan was gone taking care of his elderly father, we didn’t get to meet him until the following day. Breakfast included a traditional beverage made from dried and ground plantains and peanuts.

The families of the 3 students had been telling them for weeks that they should make a trip to the neighboring town of Lamas, known for its castle (built recently) and being home to some indigenous Amazon groups. The students and Doug spent most of the rest of the day on this trip, including a visit to a museum on local culture, when Riley could show us a sample of a (cooked) large-winged ant that locals (and Riley) have eaten for its medicinal properties.

Sunday was a big event day in San Roque; annual races of varying distances through the mountainous jungle are sponsored by an outside organization, with local residents helping prepare for the event and cooking food to sell. Josh and Maria both participated in the 10 km race, which included steeper ascents and descents than anything either of them had ever run before. Because of a misplaced sign, Josh got to run an additional 10 km bonus leg, and for no extra cost.

Being a college kid is hard, you know. Assignments, group projects, trying to stay healthy, thinking about your future and all that mumbo jumbo. Then comes your spirituality. Goshen is a Christian school, thus you have many opportunities to interact spiritually on your own and with the rest of the GC community. However, when the time comes, I always seem to be tired. After a whole week of class and homework, all I want to do on a Sunday morning is sleep!

It’s funny how much that has changed since being on SST. I have found the church and prayer to be my safe space. I have found that I resort to God in my times of need. Prayer has acted as a powerful agent in my life the past few weeks. I pray that the good God hold me and the rest of the SST group in the light, so that we can have enough strength to make it through this sometimes challenging experience.

I feel like I pray more than 5 times a day. It just feels so relaxing. This in an example of my go to prayer:

Our dear kind and loving Father who art in heaven, thank you for giving us this day and night. As this day many of us go to work, to school, I ask that you help us and keep us safe. Thank you for giving me such an amazing and supportive family here in Peru. I ask that you continue to bless them through anything that they do. Lord, help my friends and family back in the USA and in Kenya too.

Lord, I pray for our SST group and I ask that you keep us happy, safe and healthy. Help each and every one of us and hold us close to your heart so we can feel your love and warmth through any hard times. Thank you for bringing me closer and closer to you each day. I come humbly before you with all my struggles on SST and I ask that you take them into your hand. I ask you Lord that you use me as a light in someone’s life today. Thank you Lord for everything you have done for us.

Lane holds a “Happy Anniversary” poster with his students back in the gym.

Arequipa, the second-largest city in Peru, is home to 3 students for their service placements. Located in southern Peru, it sits in the middle of a desert, making the air very dry, but at an altitude of 7,700 feet the climate is just right: warm, but not hot. It’s often known as the “white city” because of a common white volcanic stone used in many of the oldest buildings.

On Thursday we visited Brad at his home for lunch and met his parents, including his father Julio who was a great conversationalist. Later Brad took us to an old colonial building downtown where he works for a Catholic charity that runs an after-school program for children from low-income families. He works with about 50 students, helping serve food, assist the children with their homework, and doing some English instruction.

Supper that night was with Achieng and her family, including her mother Dolly, father Juan Carlos, brother Johaquin, sister Valentina, and an uncle. The following day Achieng took us to the hospital where she works in several capacities. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she works with a doctor, assisting during consultations and checking on patients. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she works in the “Topico” ward helping take patient histories, weights, temperatures, etc. Her favorite work is with the babies that come to the hospital, and her dream experience was to see a birth before her time there ended (and this happened a week later).

Our visit with Lane began at his school, which, as we arrived, was lining up all the students for a parade around the neighborhood to celebrate the school’s 25th anniversary. The non-denominational religious school is named after a prominent Protestant business leader who had made significant inroads for the acceptance of Protestants in the predominantly Catholic city. In preparation for the big march the children had made a variety of posters and banners. Once the kids returned to the school, classes began again, and we got to see Lane in action, teaching English in one of the classes.

Cuzco, the high Andean city where the group’s journey to Machu Picchu began, is also the service location for three students. We began our visit with the service location of Emily, an American Sign Language major who is assisting teachers in classes for deaf children. Her school, Don Jose de Martin, was built only 2 years ago and has the best facilities of any school in Peru for deaf students. Emily alternates between teaching 2 different classrooms of students, one of elementary-aged students and one of students aged 10-14. Later we visited Emily’s home, where she lives with Gloria (a nurse), Mauricio, and their 3 children on one of the hillside communities at the edge of the Cuzco valley.

On Monday we had lunch with Maddie and her family, which includes her parents, Francisca and Rolando, and their adult son Cristian. They work with missionaries and have a wood-working shop in their home. Later we saw Maddie’s work at the local office of World Vision. They have a well-known child sponsorship program, which includes sponsors sending letters in English to sponsored children in the Cuzco area. Each day Maddie translates those letters – lots of those letters – from English to Spanish.

The third student working in Cuzco is Alex, with whom we had a wonderful breakfast of banana pancakes on Tuesday at the home of his parents, Margarita and Cesar, and their two children, Ana and Agustin. This was on the national holiday El Dia de los Muertos, so we could stay and chat a long time. The next day we visited Alex’s service location, the private Mennonite school La Promesa. Alex teaches music (the recorder) and English classes to several different grades. Mennonite families we stayed with earlier in Lucre and Huarcarpay send their children to this school in Cuzco.

Ayacucho has traditionally been famous for having 33 large Catholic churches, its large Easter week celebrations, and for being the site of a famous battle for South American independence. But in recent history it is best known, tragically, as the birthplace of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) terrorist movement that had its zenith from 1980-2000. An estimated 70,000 people, disproportionately civilians, were killed either by Shining Path or government security forces during the conflict.

Tim works at The Museum of the Memory (El Museo de la Memoria), dedicated to teaching future generations about the conflict. It began as an organization of mothers of those who had been “disappeared” by either Shining Path or the military, but a group from Germany that works to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust urged the mothers to begin a museum that would teach future generations about the Conflict, so that it is never repeated. After Tim introduced us to the museum and his work, we went to his home for lunch with his father, Samuel (a pastor), and mother, Julia.

John lives a 45-minute drive outside Ayacucho in the small village of Quinua, famous for its artisan crafts, the livelihood for most of the town’s population. This suits John, an art major, very well. Even better, he lives and works in the home of the town’s most famous potter, Maximilio Limaco. Rachel, Alex, and Tim joined Maria and Doug for the trip to Quinua to visit John, arriving in time for a traditional Andean lunch with the family. During our visit several groups of tourists came shopping at the combination home/art gallery.

Quinua is most famous for having been the site of the 1824 Battle of Ayacucho, where South American forces fighting for independence defeated the Spanish royalist army. John took us to the historical monument and battlefield, where the students also rode horses for an hour.

Doug and Maria’s first trip to visit students at their service locations was to the city of Ayacucho, high in the Andean mountains at an elevation of about 9,000 feet above sea level (and about a 10-hour overnight bus ride from Lima). Four students are doing service in Ayacucho or nearby; in this blog post we’ll share our visits with Rachel and Alex, and tomorrow we’ll share our visits with Tim and John.

Our first stop was at Rachel’s home for lunch (chicken, potatoes, sweet potatoes and Lima beans) with her mother and little brother. Rachel says that her mother, Nieves, who works in a stall at the market, knows everyone in town. During lunch we were joined by Nieves’ aunt, who speaks Quechua, the indigenous language descended from the Incas.

After lunch we walked with Rachel to her service location, Getsemani, and after-school program run by an Assemblies of God congregation. Rachel teaches English and plays games with the children, who also receive lunch and devotions at the church.

In the evening we went to the home of Alex for supper with her family. Alex’s mother, Lidia, who owns and runs a restaurant at the edge of town, prepared a delicious meal of chaufa, a Peruvian Chinese rice dish. Alex’s father, Oscar, works as a security guard.

In the morning we met Alex at Kinder Vidas, a private pre-school. Alex teaches English to the children, who are also taught Quechua at the school. In Incan language is often the only language spoken by elder Andeans, somewhat by the next generation, but is not being learned by most of the young today.